Economy & Aid
Israel withholds the revenues that keep West Bank clinics open
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Four hundred and forty-seven of the Palestinian health ministry's 590 service branches in the occupied West Bank now open once or twice a week. That is what happens to a health system when the money that runs it is held in another treasury.
The Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights set out the count this month. Only 63 percent of primary healthcare centres were even partially operational through 2025, many of them for a single day a week, and of roughly 1,260 essential medicines the ministry normally stocks, 160 are gone, about 600 have days of supply left and some 250 are down to limited quantities.
Doctors and nurses have been paid in fractions, late. In May the doctors began an open-ended strike over wages that had not arrived.
Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues while the healthcare system those revenues sustain is collapsing.
Milena Ansari, director, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, occupied Palestinian territory department
The arithmetic of the clearance file#
Israel collects customs and VAT on the Palestinian Authority's imports under the Oslo arrangements and is supposed to transfer the proceeds monthly. The group's report cites World Bank figures showing the monthly deductions from those transfers climbing from about $66 million before October 2023 to roughly $165 million, with about $1.17 billion withheld between February 2019 and July 2024 alone.
Since May 2025 the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has held the transfers entirely, and the Times of Israel reported that his ministry moved none of the money across a full year. In April his office said 590 million shekels of the 740 million collected that month went to the Authority's accumulated bills to Israel's electricity, water and environmental bodies.
The Palestine Exchange, meanwhile, closed Sunday's session with the Al-Quds index up 0.21 percent at 673.70 points on turnover of $313,268 — a market slightly higher and a payroll still unpaid.
Wages and medicines are the part of this file that reaches households. A clinic that opens one day a week is a chronic patient who waits six.
